Salvaging the Kulluk, And Trying to Prevent a Spill

The Shell Arctic oil-drilling rig Kulluk now sits close to the shore of Sitkalidak Island, where it ran aground on New Year's Eve. Industry and government officials are trying to figure out how to salvage the vessel and prevent any of its fuel from leaking into the sea.

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UPDATE (Friday, 10 am EST): Salvage crews that spent hours on the grounded Shell oil rig Kulluk on both Wednesday and Thursday have identified several areas of damage to the vessel, Shell Alaska operations manager Sean Churchfield said in a Thursday afternoon press conference. "The findings include some wave damage to the topside of the vessel," he said. "A number of watertight doors have been breached, causing water damage inside, and the emergency and service generators have been damaged." The damage to the electrical systems means that crews either will have to bring more generators during salvage operations or work without power on the rig, Churchfield said. There still has been no sign of an oil sheen or fuel leakage from the Kulluk, which remains stable and upright in its beached location several hundred feet off Alaska's Sitkalidak island.

Yesterday a team of five salvage experts traveled from the U.S. Coast Guard's Air Station Kodiak in Alaska 40 miles southwest to the grounded Shell oil rig Kulluk. Used for exploratory oil drilling in the Arctic, the conical, 266-foot-diameter Kulluk rig ran aground on New Year's Eve, several days after a towline connecting it to the 360-foot tug Aiviq broke in a winter storm. Wednesday's visit was the first up-close look at the rig since the grounding.

As of Wednesday evening the Kulluk was upright and stable. It is resting on the shore of Sitkalidak Island, a 73,764-acre island rich in wildlife but with no human inhabitants. Repeated Coast Guard flyovers have not detected any oil leaking from the vessel, though the salvage team found that at least one of the fuel tanks might have suffered damage. "The tanks they looked at were mainly intact but they did see one that was sucking and blowing a little bit," Shell operations manager Sean Churchfield said at a Wednesday night news conference.

Ten salvagers had been scheduled to spend several hours on the ship on Wednesday. But because of deteriorating weather conditions, a second helicopter flight was canceled and only half the group made it out. The salvagers were from Smit Salvage, a company that handled the salvage of the Selendang Ayu, a Malaysian cargo ship that grounded near Dutch Harbor, Alaska, in 2004, and assisted with the salvage efforts for the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia last year.

Churchfield said that three hours onboard the Kulluk didn't give the team of five sufficient time to do a full assessment of the ship. The team is now preparing a report that will be used to develop a plan to extract the craft from the rocky shore, though officials declined to estimate if such an attempt could be days, weeks, or months away. Further onboard assessments—as well as possible diving expeditions—may take place before a plan is finalized.

The Kulluk has no independent propulsion and so must be towed. It is grounded several hundred feet off Sitkalidak, which is separated from much larger Kodiak Island by a narrow straight. On the Kodiak side of the straight is Old Harbor, a native village with a population of about 200 that can be reached only by boat or air.

The Kulluk is much sturdier than the typical fishing boat that occasionally ends up grounded on Alaska's rocky shores. Its outer hull is made of a steel alloy that's three inches thick and designed to withstand the force of heavy ice. The three primary fuel tanks are situated well up inside the vessel rather than close to the skin, as they would be on many fishing boats.

In addition, Coast Guard public affairs officer Sara Francis points out that the Kulluk's approximately 150,000 gallons of fuel is diesel and hydraulic as opposed to bunker or crude. "It's a different animal from what we've encountered in the past," she says. "It doesn't hang around as long. It's more prone to break up and evaporate because it's the lighter end of the fuel spectrum."

Nearly a week ago the Coast Guard had defined the worst-case scenario for the Kulluk: a grounding. Now there's a new worst-case scenario: that the pounding ocean or salvage operations themselves would breach the ship and cause a damaging oil spill.

On Wednesday, Shell's tow vessel Nanuk was dispatched northwest to Seward, Alaska, to collect spill-response equipment. "We're working on two priorities," Coast Guard Cmdr. Shane Montoya said in a news conference earlier this week, soon after industry, Coast Guard, state, federal, and local authorities joined to form a unified command to manage the unfolding scenario. "Number one is posturing ourselves to respond to a pollution incident if one occurs . . . The second is to identify and assess how we're going to salvage this vessel as safely as possible."